The Nile River itself is easy to trace. It runs northward from the city of Khartoum in Sudan through Egypt and drains into the Mediterranean. It is created, though, from the confluence of two other rivers, The White Nile and the Blue Nile. By the early nineteenth century, European explorers had shown that the Blue Nile, which supplies much of the water for the Nile, was a shorter river, arising only in neighboring Ethiopia. From then forward, they fixed their attention on the mysterious White Nile, which arose much further south on the Continent.

AMAZON

The Nile River is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa, it's generally regarded as the longest river in the world at 6,853 km long. The Nile is an "international" river as its water resources are shared by eleven countries, namely, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt. In particular, the Nile is the primary water resource and life artery for Egypt and Sudan. Most of the population and cities of Egypt lie along those parts of the Nile valley north of Aswan, and nearly all the cultural and historical sites of Ancient Egypt are found along the riverbanks. The Nile ends in a large delta that empties into the Mediterranean Sea.- You Tube​Africa was always dubbed 'The Dark Continent'. This sobriquet never referred to pigment of skin, instead it referred to the impenetrable geography that immediately arises from the sands of both East and West Africa. Prior to the invention of the railroad (steam) and the boring of hard steel (rifle), Africa remained the 'Dark Continent'. It was simply not available for exploration. Certainly the Romans were familiar with the northern coast of Africa, given available references in numerous literature we can surmise Romanic understanding of Africa.

Given the Islamic irritant that was Spain and the success of its pincer movement up into both Hungary and France around 1200 A.D. It fell to the Spanish and Henry the Navigator to find away around the sons of Ishmael. Given new rigging of ships and the political motivation to outpace Islam, both Spain and Portugal set out to hug the west coast of Africa in search of what became of India, the Philippines and Japan. How else to say it: that Mediterranean Lake became a sideshow after the discovery of the Americas.

The Dark Continent would again capture the imagination of western Europeans in what became Victoria's Empire. The names of Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Richard Burton are well known forerunners to our Lawrence of Arabia. The two key decades of exploration into both Central African Congo and the search for the origins of the Nile are told by Tim Jeal in 'Explorers of the Nile: The triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure.'

Exploring Central Africa from its Eastern border as well as going south to discover the origin of the Nile meant wading into and surviving the backdrop of torture, casual execution, disease, warfare, massacre, pillage and extortion almost impossible for contemporary people to imagine.

Tim Jeal is the biographer of both Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. He begins with Richard Burton and Speke's journey to Lake Tanganyika (1856-9) and Speke's 'discovery' of Lake Victoria. Jeal ends with Stanley's legendary trans-African crossing (1874-7) from Zanzibar in the east to the mouth of the Congo in the west, perhaps the greatest feats of exploration in the entire annals of history.

There are ten biographies of Burton, but only one of Speke. Speke solved the world's greatest mystery by discovering the source of the Nile. In 1858 John Speke stood on the shore of a huge lake that was called Nyanza Ukerewe (renamed by Speke as 'Victoria'), he instinctively sensed that this was the source of the Nile River flowing 4,230 miles north. John Speke was right and Richard Burton had it wrong. Burton claimed that the origin of the Nile was Lake Tanganykia. Nevertheless, it was Burton who garnished the greatest acclaim, even being Knighted before his untimely death in 1890.

Here's how Speke won: In May of 1858, Speke, on his own inclination, left Burton's Lake Tanganyika expedition (Burton was ill and could no longer travel) and journeyed with a few men 200 miles north to find Lake Ukerewe. The sheer size of the body of water and its height above sea level (Speke's calculation was 4,000 feet above sea level, considerable higher than Tanganyika) convinced him that here lay the headwaters for the Nile. Speke returned in 1860-63 with James Grant to explore its shores and found the falls (Ripton Falls) where the Nile exited Lake Victoria to begin with its journey north into the Mediterranean.

Both Livingstone and Burton were violently against the 'speculations' of John Speke. Given the flair that became of both it is obvious that they are burnished onto the British psyche. But it was Speke who was right! Not Burton or Livingstone. As in our day, flair, charisma and drama overcome all other considerations.

It fell to Henry Morton Stanley in 1874 to circumnavigate the lake to vindicate Speke.

The question becomes, what accounts for the failure that was Speke's untarnished reputation?

The answer is simple. John Speke died in a horrible hunting accident exactly at the moment when the Nile Debate was at its feverish height, leaving the field clear for other competitors.

John Speke and Richard Burton were scheduled to debate each other at the Royal Geographical Society during the summer of 1864, arbitrated by Livingstone. The day before the debate, Speke's rifle accidently went off killing him immediately during a hunting trip. The only witness was his cousin George Fuller, the gamekeeper was to far away to be of any real forensic assistance. According to the only biography of John Speke (Alexander Maitland's 1971 biography) Speke's gun had an extremely light pull on the trigger, making it lethal for any user or circumstance to fire.

The best explanation is that Speke nervously cocked the hammer of one barrel so lightly that a jar on the stock would make it fire. Having climbed a wall with his rifle jammed into his armpit, bringing the stock into violent contact with stone killed him instantly.

Thus ending a brilliant career of England's best explorer.

The Victorian race to explore Africa cannot be understood outside explorational antipathies that were primarily intellectual. We simply cannot ignore how Africa served as a great catalyst from which to expel personal demons and shape a life informed from passionate media. Solitude, strangeness, danger and the lure of great wealth and fame propelled most Victorian explorers. John Speke was different.

Speke was not motivated by stark contrasts, whether personal or not. He just never fit the bill that served as a template for most: the unending displays of petty bickering, petulance and self regard. Speke found no room in his heart for such. As such, the academics bane toward pedantic gesture was not for him. The complicated eccentric psyches that propelled the Victorian explorers are all on display in this book, one simply cannot ignore the sheer weight of multiple neuroses that contributed the tremendous energy, personal stamina and courage required to master the Dark Continent.

As political change sweeps the streets and squares, the parliaments and presidential palaces of the Arab world, Shereen El Feki has been looking at an upheaval a little closer to home—in the sexual lives of men and women in Egypt and across the region. The result is an informative, insightful, and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society.Sex is entwined in religion, tradition, politics, economics, and culture, so it is the perfect lens through which to examine the complex social landscape of the Arab world. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, from sex work to same-sex relations, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the region and brings new voices to the debate over its future. This is no peep show or academic treatise but a highly personal and often humorous account of one woman’s journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate and, in the process, to better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking research, Sex and the Citadel gives us a unique and timely understanding of everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing before our eyes.- Amazon

Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki. Shereen El Feki is a writer, broadcaster, and academic who started her professional life in medical science before going on to become an award-winning journalist with The Economist and a presenter with Al Jazeera English. She is the former vice-chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and the Law, as well as a TED Global Fellow. Shereen writes for a number of publications, among them The Huffington Post. With roots in Egypt and Wales, Shereen grew up in Canada; she now divides her time between London and Cairo. "Sex and the Citadel" is her first book. Learn more at www.sexandthecitadel.com

“A principled book, robustly educative and illuminating without consenting to the kind of vacant voyeurism that the intimate life veiled by Islam can provoke in unthinking outsiders.” —The Times Higher Education Supplement

“A bold, meticulously researched mini Kinsey Report, rich in anecdote and statistics. . . . Islam and faith are not incompatible with a healthier, more liberal attitude to sex, but rather an exciting component of the revolutions now taking shape.” —The Spectator.

A harvest moon—or the full moon that happens nearest to the fall equinox—is due to appear in the sky on the night of Friday the 13th. It may be an inauspicious date, but fans of lunar phenomena will find themselves feeling lucky, because something rare is set to happen this year. The harvest moon often appears large and orange, since many people observe it as it surfaces above the horizon. But in 2019, the harvest moon will seem unusually small.

As Jenna Amatulli reports for the Huffington Post, this phenomenon is known as a “micromoon,” which occurs when a full moon happens close to the lunar apogee, or the point at which the moon is farthest from Earth. (A supermoon, which appears large in the sky, happens when the full moon coincides with the perigee, or the moon’s closest approach to our planet). To people watching from the ground, a micromoon looks around 14 percent smaller than a typical full moon, according to the Time and Date.

The Harvest micromoon is a rare occurrence, according to Amatulli. Typically, the moon rises at an average of 50 minutes later each day, but around the time of the autumnal equinox, that difference shrinks to just 30 minutes each day. “The reason for this seasonal circumstance is that at this time of the year, the path of the moon through the sky is as close to being along the horizon as it can get,” the Farmer’s Almanac explains. “Thus, from night to night the moon moves more horizontally than vertically and thus rises sooner from one night to the next.”

This early moonrise allows farmers to continue working after sunset by the light of the full moon during the height of the harvest season—hence the moon’s name.

For skywatchers in the Eastern time zone, the harvest moon will turn full at around 12:33 a.m. on September 14, but those in the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones will be able to catch it just before midnight on the 13th. There hasn’t been a nation-wide full moon on Friday the 13th since October 2000, and the next one won’t happen until August 13, 2049.

So if basking under a full moon on a spooky night sounds like your jam, now is your chance to make it happen. Head to a spot with minimal light pollution for the best view, and watch as the full—albeit slightly smaller than usual—celestial body illuminates the night sky.

A monumental retelling of world history through the lens of the sea—revealing in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, lake and stream, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world’s waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human.

The Sea and Civilization is a mesmerizing, rhapsodic narrative of maritime enterprise, from the origins of long-distance migration to the great seafaring cultures of antiquity; from Song Dynasty human-powered paddle-boats to aircraft carriers and container ships. Lincoln Paine takes the reader on an intellectual adventure casting the world in a new light, in which the sea reigns supreme.

Above all, Paine makes clear how the rise and fall of civilizations can be linked to the sea. An accomplishment of both great sweep and illuminating detail, The Sea and Civilization is a stunning work of history.

The film tracks a team of archeologists, scientists and historians as they travel throughout the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to search for the true “Atlantean” civilization — and a possible location for the mother city, the lost city itself, using cutting-edge technology and Plato’s ancient writings as a virtual treasure map to lead the way.

PEOPLE can exclusively reveal a sneak peek at the documentary, in which Jacobovici travels to the Pillars of Hercules, the ancient name given to a point that flanks the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, to investigate what just might be a startling discovery.

“This legendary diver in these parts, that they nicknamed The Panther, shot this video footage,” Jacobovici tells Cameron via Skype. “When I got images of it at the beginning, I thought: ‘This is a joke.’ ”

“But when I looked at still frame grabs, it looks like an underwater Nuragic [site],” he continues. “It’s big — it’s got pillars, it’s got steps, it’s got circles. It’s the Hollywood version of Atlantis, and it’s supposed to be right here, where we are.”

As for how that scene pans out? Stay tuned to find out — but one thing’s for sure, and it’s that Cameron believes exploring myths — and what we can learn from them — is important.

“That’s how the ruins of Troy were found!” Cameron tells PEOPLE. “With Plato, we have only fragments from Critias and Timaeus, but yet this fragmentary story has intrigued people for the 2,400 years since he wrote it.”

“When I’m not doing my day job as a Hollywood movie guy, I’m doing my other job as an ocean explorer,” he continues. “The payoff is that in the course of searching for Atlantis and exploring the possible sites, we came up with some pretty good evidence that there was in fact a ship-based trading culture outside the so-called Pillars of Hercules, which is the Strait of Gibraltar, just off the coast of Spain. That’s pretty big.”​http://people.com/tv/james-cameron-atlantis-rising-documentary-legend-lost-city-atlantis-exclusive/

How a seven-year cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history.

In May 1315 it started to rain. It didn't stop anywhere in north Europe until August. Next came the four coldest winters in a millennium. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europes livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed all remaining farmland. After seven years, the combination of lost harvests, warfare, and pestilence would claim six million livesone eighth of Europes total population.

William Rosen draws on a wide array of disciplines, from military history to feudal law to agricultural economics and climatology, to trace the succession of traumas that caused the Great Famine. With dramatic appearances by Scotlands William Wallace, the luckless Edward II, and his treacherous Queen Isabella, historys best documented episode of catastrophic climate change comes alive, with powerful implications for future calamities.

​Erudite rendering of the cataclysmic climate changes wrought at the start of the fourteenth century. Rosen delights in the minutiae of history, down to the most fascinating footnotes. Here, the author delivers engrossing disquisitions on climate patterns and dynastic entanglements between England and Scotland (among others), and he posits that the decisive advent of cooler, wetter weather in the early fourteenth century signaled the beginning of the end of the medieval good times. A work that glows from the author's relish for his subject. Kirkus Reviews

“A kink in Europe’s climate during the fourteenth century indirectly triggered a seven-year cataclysm that left six million dead, William Rosen reveals in this rich interweaving of agronomy, meteorology, economics and history.... Rosen deftly delineates the backstory and the perfect storm of heavy rains, hard winters, livestock epidemics, and war leading to the catastrophe.”--Nature

“Rosen... delights in the minutiae of history, down to the most fascinating footnotes... Engrossing.... A work that glows from the author’s relish for his subject.”--Kirkus

“Rosen (The Most Powerful Idea in the World) argues persuasively that natural disasters are most catastrophic when humankind’s actions give them a push. The depredations committed in battle by Englishmen and Scots were augmented by years of bad weather: the result was that people died in droves. The interactions Rosen describes have been studied but are seldom incorporated into popular history, and the author never overreaches in his conclusions, providing a well-grounded chronicle.... This book will appeal foremost to history lovers, but it should also interest anyone who enjoys a well-documented story.”--Library Journal

“William Rosen is a good enough writer to hold interest and maintain the fraught relations between nature and politics as a running theme. He ends The Third Horseman with a stark observation: in some ways, global ecology is more precarious nowadays than it was in the 1300s.”—Milwaukee Express​“Rosen is a terrific storyteller and engaging stylist; his vigorous recaps of famous battles and sketches of various colorful characters will entertain readers not unduly preoccupied by thematic rigor.... Rosen’s principal goal, however, is not to horrify us, but to make us think.... While vividly re-creating a bygone civilization, he invites us to look beyond our significant but ultimately superficial differences and recognize that we too live in fragile equilibrium with the natural world whose resources we recklessly exploit, and that like our medieval forebears we may well be vulnerable to ‘a sudden shift in the weather.’”—The Daily Beast

The Prussian naturalist (1769-1859) inspired Darwin to take the voyage on The Beagle, bringing all 9 volumes of his writings on board to accompany his journey throughout South America. When he died, his funeral in Berlin went on for weeks, newspapers covered his achievements for months, tens of thousands of fans besieged Berlin paying homage to his achievement. And he spawned untold faithfulness from Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, John Muir (American naturalist founder of U.S. National Parks, Preservationist) & Fredrick Law Olmstead, father of Central Park NYC.

von Humboldt is every child digging in the sand, on the beach or drawing wild flowers.

With the Balkanization of the sciences, two World Wars devoted to halting German expansion dimmed our vision of how Germania wrought this astonishing man forward to jungles, rivers, fauna and fowl in far away exotic places.

How did that happen?

von Humboldt was born at a time when the social impact of the industrial revolution was beginning; like Alexander Hamilton, von Humboldt implicitly understood how the boring of steel for rifles or train tracks would change social relations, ushering in social mobility impacting aristocratic classes in rigid societies. Like Alexis Tocqueville, von Humboldt grasped early on that virtue held to industriousness would procure untold talent. The man never stopped traveling, discovering, exploring and writing.

Throughout his life he tried to escape the suffocating confines of his mother, yet he was torn not to abandon her. After university he acquired a job in the Prussian mines, bringing him into contact with the father of geology, the Scottish James Hutton (d. 1797). As a child he loved the explorations of Spanish conquistadors and circumnavigators like Louis Antoine de Bougainville. But it was not until his mothers death of cancer in 1796, at the age of 27, that he was free. He NEVER attended her funeral.

He immediately abandoned his career with the Prussian civil service and began planning a great voyage. He settled for South America. He told King Carlos IV of Spain that he conceived of the entire Earth as a living organism, he aspired to tackle cloud structures, insect and specimen behavior, rivers, temperatures and geography throughout the Spanish kingdom. King Carlos gave him a colonial passport running to explore Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Peru discovering the magnetic equator along with new plants, animals and minerals. He brought home to Germania electric eels to experiment with electricity. His contacts with indigenous tribes was voluminous. The 34 volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent was published, much to the ire of imperial rivals in Paris or London.

Climbing the Chimborazo volcano at 17,000 feet we see him crawling a two inch wide ridge during winter to outline geography of South America. This map, with its notations is pictured above. With disintegrating shoes he continues barefoot with his companion Aime Bonpland.

After a 5 year journey throughout South America, he landed in Washington D.C. in 1804 entertaining President Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison and Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, perhaps the only man who matches von Humboldt's temperament.

Having arrived in Washington, he advises Jefferson on Texas (at the time it was Mexico), but von Humboldt convinced Jefferson that its savanna's and water routes were worth fighting Mexico.

While flying the Beagle toward South America, Darwin read Personal Narrative to discover von Humboldt's writings regarding natural selection.The word would be coined by Darwin, Humboldt wrote that animals "limit each other's numbers' through long continued contest for nourishment and territory." The Origin of Specieshas its patrimony with Humboldt's work, mostly written while journeying throughout South America.

More than 3,000 years ago, King Tutankhamon’s desiccated body was lovingly wrapped and sent into the future as an immortal god. After resting undisturbed for more than three millennia, King Tut’s mummy was suddenly awakened in 1922. Archaeologist Howard Carter had discovered the boy-king’s tomb, and the soon-to-be famous mummy’s story—even more dramatic than King Tut’s life—began. The mummy’s “afterlife” is a modern story, not an ancient one. Award-winning science writer Jo Marchant traces the mummy’s story from its first brutal autopsy in 1925 to the most recent arguments over its DNA. From the glamorous treasure hunts of the 1920s to today’s high-tech scans in volatile modern Egypt, Marchant introduces us to the brilliant and sometimes flawed people who have devoted their lives to revealing the mummy’s secrets, unravels the truth behind the hyped-up TV documentaries, and explains what science can and can’t tell us about King Tutankhamon.

Evidence of weathering on the obelisk in NYC. Known weathering rates of granites in different climates are compared with weathering damage on Cleopatra's Needle, an Egyptian obelisk in Central Park, New York City. ... It is concluded that the bulk of damage on the obelisk actually occurred in Egypt through rising moisture loaded with sulfate salts.

www.DrBobBrier.com

Cleopatra's Needle is the popular name for each of three Ancient Egyptianobelisks re-erected in London, Paris, and New York City during the nineteenth century. The obelisks in London and New York are a pair; the one in Paris is also part of a pair originally from a different site in Luxor, where its twin remains. Although all three needles are genuine Ancient Egyptian obelisks, their shared nickname is a misnomer, as they have no connection with the PtolemaicQueen Cleopatra VII of Egypt and were already over a thousand years old in her lifetime. An earlier reference states Queen Cleopatra brought the London obelisk from Heliopolis to Alexandria shortly before the time of Christ for the purpose of decorating a new temple but it was never erected and lay buried in sand on the shore until presented to the British nation in 1819. The London and New York needles were originally made during the reign of the 18th DynastyPharaohThutmose III. The Paris needle dates to the reign of the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II, and was the first to be moved and re-erected. The New York needle was the first to acquire the French nickname, "L'aiguille de Cléopâtre",[1] when it stood in Alexandria. -Wikipedia

Most visitors to New York City travel right past it, never noticing the majesty of Egypt's New Kingdom in the new world. Cleopatra's Needle resides in NYC immediately adjacent to Central Park; there's nothing like it throughout the entire city landscape.

​It is an obelisk, and it was used by the ancient Egyptians to commemorate Dynastic achievement; for the Romans, it was used to acknowledge a superior foe defeated in combat.

Most obelisk's weigh hundreds of tons, there are 28 Egyptian obelisk's standing today, only 6 of them remain in Egypt. Rome possesses 11 and many more remain scattered throughout the littoral Mediterranean. Three of the most famous are in New York, Paris, and London.

The obelisks's in Paris, New York, and London were all moved two times before landing where they now reside. The previous author of these said obelisk's was Emperor Augustus himself.

Egyptian technology was extremely primitive, possessing only bronze chisels from which to work limestone used to build the pyramids, they had absolutely no metal tools capable of dealing with far harder granite from which obelisk's were quarried. Egyptian dynasties used dolerite balls (an igneous rock very much shaped and used like bowling balls) to pound the surrounding granite of a future obelisk. Working 12 hour days, a quarryman could lower a trench around the obelisk nearly an inch a day. Taking six months to separate sides from the quarried obelisk, the harder part was freeing the bottom, this was done by pounding sideways.

The world's foremost authority on obelisk's is Bob Brier, his book Cleopatra's Needles is now out from Bloomsbury. Here you discover how the Egyptians, Romans, Renaissance Vatican engineers and new world plutocrats moved these lovely megaliths.

A 51 year old book collector and librarian named Abdel Kader Haidara lives in the fabled city of Timbuktu, an ancient city in West Africa called Mali. In April of 2012 having returned home from a brief trip to Europe, he witnessed the envelopment of his city from al-Qaeda and its African affiliates throughout the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM); panicked knowing the cities libraries would soon be plundered he grabbed the nearest phone and called The Ford Foundation in Nigeria. The game was on to rescue Islamic manuscripts from an ever encroaching black flag.

The Ford Foundation knew of Mr. Haidara because of a grant he was given to pursue studies at Oxford, he called pleading that the committee find a way to transfer that money for the purchasing of empty oil barrels, donkeys, carts and petty cash.

Three days later, the monies flowed and Haidara was off, secretly finding trustworthy fellow travelers in secretly identifying the manuscripts, packaging them for release. . .

The goal was to disperse all 400,000 manuscripts. . .

Metal and wooden trunks, empty oil barrels and carts arrived at nearly 80 a day, packed tight and released to strangers. . .

In the course of 8 months, his Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and other were empty. . .

The smuggling was enormous, quiet and ruthlessly efficient.

By January of 2013, upon the arrival of French troops in Mali, the smuggling operation was over. . . And the process of return completed with national honor.